How to Eat More Chocolate and be Healthy!

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Many people cannot resist chocolate, which makes things tricky when you are trying eat healthier or prescribe to a weight loss plan. Thankfully, there is a way to keep chocolate in your diet and be healthy. Dark chocolate reduces blood pressure, helping your brain and heart and eating a little bit every day will help you curb cravings for other non-healthy sweet and salty foods. The key is having a bit of dark chocolate everyday, but not overdoing it by binging and eating too much. If it is too hard to only have a handful of dark chocolate chips or one or two squares of chocolate, use the following suggestions to limit how much chocolate you are consuming.

Try melting your daily allowance of dark chocolate and drizzling it on something yummy. You can add it to fresh fruit or popcorn or something more exotic. Some have tried pairing dark chocolate with unexpected foods and loved the results. Maybe put your chocolate on asparagus or roasted cauliflower. You could also try making chocolate covered olives, garlic, or sundried tomatoes. Get creative and see if you like the result. To get a boost of protein and a great chocolate flavor, you can fold your daily dose of chocolate into nut butter. You can buy butter made from pecans, walnuts, macadamia nuts, cashews, almonds, sunflower sees, hemp seeds, and coconut. Add chocolate to each and see what you like best. You can use your newly chocolate laced butter to fill celery stalks or for a dip.

The options are endless for including a bit of chocolate into dishes. Try it in some spicy dishes or something savory. Whatever you do, enjoy your bit of chocolate everyday and let your friends know that chocolate can be healthy!

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Square Order Food App

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If you thought you didn’t have enough options with Tapingo, Seamless, Delivery.com, Foursqaure, Groupon, or Breadcrumb, there is a new food-ordering app in town. The popular company, Square, has now launched their app, Square Order, that allows you to order, pay for, and provides notification of delivery of many restaurant, delis, and cafes near you. It was clear that Square was hoping to break into the restaurant business when they were competing with Google to acquire a restaurant website building platform. The platform they were both vying for, Appetas, ultimately went with Google “mainly due to the close alignment of direction for the technology and the space.” Although they were not successful there, Square continued to push on to create Square Order independently and they are excited about the outcome, despite the competition.

A spokesperson from Square said the “restaurant tech space is heating up and I think having a strong SMB sales presence is huge.” The sales of food are vertical, unlike clothing or other products you don’t shop for everyday, you need to eat. Therefore those who need to purchase lunch at the office everyday or like to grab takeout for dinner may flock to an app like this one to do shopping regularly. There is also a great potential for business in restaurants, as the spokesperson noted, because they are heating up. The National Restaurant Association released data that indicated $683.4 billion in estimated sales this year over 990,000 restaurants. That means that restaurants will bring in 47 percent of all of the money spent on food in the United States. These numbers are staggering and indicate a good omen for the future of Square Order. The key to the success of the app will be building relationships with companies and food establishments for a natural transition into a possibly wider venue. Square has already had great success with local merchants with their smartphone sales, it’s time to keep the momentum going into the restaurant and perishable food industry.

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Iraqis Continue to Vote, Despite Violence

Without the aid of foreign troops, like the U.S. Army, Iraq conducted their first democratic vote this week. The current Shi’ite Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki ran as the incumbent against a few other contenders. He is running for his third term, but it may be time for a change in Iraq because the country is still very dangerous and constantly experiencing a sectarian conflict filled with bloodshed.

The last of the American soldiers pulled out of the country in 2011 and there has been a constant stream of violence ever since. The U.S. topped Saddam Hussein in 2003, which may have ended his misdeeds, but cause the entire country to erupt in violence. The sectarian conflict is between the al Qaeda Sunni’s, who have been killing hundreds of civilians each month, and the Shi’ite militia who are enacting revenge for the killings of the civilians.

The vote that took place gave the people of Iraq a choice from almost 10,000 candidates of who to put in the 328-seat parliament. The political parties that have formed include very firm Islamists as well as liberals and communists. So far, the electoral commission has stated that about 60 percent of all the voters have cast ballots. The votes will probably take about three weeks to count and the results are expected by the end of May. As can be expected, it was very difficult for some in the outer suburbs to vote. Some even noted that Maliki may have been deliberately making things difficult so that they wouldn’t have a lot of representation in the next parliament. This sort of corruption is unfortunately commonplace in the newly established, sort of democracy. Muhannad Hussam is a candidate who supports Sunni deputy prime minister Saleh Mutlaq. Hussam says, “It was all to be expected…They didn’t want the Sunnis to move for the election.” He adds that, “From our view it is not a fair election.” Sunnis pointed out irregularities all over, like broken voting machines and armed groups outside of polling stations. The sectarian divide has gotten worse for this election as Maliki clings to power and violence deepens throughout the region.

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Oprah Teaming with Starbucks for Tea

Starbucks has changed the coffee industry and now they may be doing the same thing they did with coffee, for tea, with Oprah’s help. Teavana Oprah Chai Tea is now available in Starbucks stores as well as the Teavana chain. This move could reinvigorate the ancient tradition of drinking tea. This is in part to Oprah Winfrey’s magnificent and powerful influence. Oprah has been able to make or break the career of an author’s career with her book club. Anything she recommends either skyrockets a new writer or significantly boosts sales of an old classic. Additionally, products she mentioned on her former talk show in the “Favorite Things” segment would fly off shelves and be snatched up online. Oprah has power, and Starbuck is happy to have her influence in their stores.

The reason for Oprah’s following transcends just recommended products to buy. She acts like a therapist for America. Some see her as a spiritual guide or a life coach. Oprah is the first of her kind as a “mother” and mentor to many in the form of a TV personality. She is unprecedented and this makes her power immense. Oprah encourages all of us to “live your best life” she started a movement towards socially “conscious capitalism” and the CEO of Starbucks, Howard Schulz is using that mantra to help sell tea. Every Oprah tea product purchased with benefit the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy Foundation.

Starbucks bought the Teavana tea chain in 2012 when they had 300 stores. They are hoping to expand and bring the teashop to every corner, as they have done with Starbucks. So far they have plans laid out to open 1,000 more Teavana chain stores in North America and many more stores internationally. Schulz is working hard to make sure that the legacy of tea in the Starbucks empire is from his influence. The CEO of Belus Capital Advisors, Brian Sozzi said, “Howard Schultz has two acts left as CEO of Starbucks: to truly unleash the power of mobile, and make folks care about premium tea as much as they care about premium coffee.”

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Europe Supports Harsh Consequences for Sterling

While the U.S. is buzzing about the lifetime ban of Clippers owner Donald Sterling, Europe is also weighing in. European citizens supported the ban and are calling the NBA to force him to sell the team. They are also encouraging the well loved sport, football (or soccer in America) to take similar measures against racism.

The leaders in football, Sepp Blatter, who is the president of international governing body FIFA and the European counterpart, Michel Latini both condemned Sterling’s comments and applauded the NBA for taking swift, decisive, and harsh action. Blatter wrote a tweet that read, “Sport says no to racism. I fully support @NBA’s decision to ban @LACLippers owner for life after his racist words.” Platini told the Associated Press, “It is a great decision and I support it completely.” A French player for the 1998 World Cup winning team, Partick Vieira tweeted, “Well done to @NBA, another organization dealing with racism in exactly the right way. I say again- zero tolerance.” There have been some racism issues in European football for a few decades. Just a week ago, a season ticket holder was at a Villarreal game threw a banana at black Barcelona defender, Dani Alves. The Spanish police arrested the man and banned him from the stadium for life. Alves defiantly picked up the banana and took a bite. His actions swirled around social media as a campaign against racism, in support of the Brazilian player.

Even though Villarreal acted quickly against the actions of the fan, others have been critical of the ability of football leadership to deal with racism quickly. Some have looked at the NBA and Silver quickly condemning and banning Sterling and thought, why can’t football do that? Retired British NBA player, John Amaechi said of the NBA, “if they can do that to respond to a hateful private utterance, why the hell can’t football do that to respond to repeated instances of hate-mongering?”

Credit Suisse and BNP Paribas Tax Charges

Two companies, Credit Suisse Group AG (CSGN) and BNP Paribas SA (BNP) may be charged, criminally for having business dealing with banned nations. The major banks are being pursued by U.S. and state prosecutors and may be facing tax charges.

Credit Suisse has been a target since 2011 when they were investigated for possibly aiding Americans with evading their taxes. The federal probe against BNP Paribas is for violating the ban of doing business with prohibited countries. Usually in these types of cases, banks are considered too important to the legal system to prosecute and therefore the government usually brokers settlements with large financial institutions. Things may be different this time around because of comments like “a significant financial institution” will soon be charged from U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara. The former chairman of Citigroup thinks that the government is bluffing. Sanfod Weill said, “Maybe the U.S. attorney’s office is saying these things to get a resolution of the problem without it going to court and without having to do that. How does a bank stay in business if they’re charged criminally?”

Charging a bank not only puts their business in flux, but may also threaten national or global economies. This is because banks, countries, and economies are so interconnected. Even the Attorney General, Eric Holder told Congress early last year that “the size of some of these institutions becomes so large that it does become difficult for use to prosecute them.” However, this time things might be different as prosecutors seem to mean business. They have already approached the New York Fed to discuss what measures to take to take to contain a fall out, should they apply criminal charges. One option that was discussed for BNP Paribas is suspending the firm’s ability to get transfer any money through New York for their foreign clients. Whispers of such actions have already made the stock fall abroad. Things are looking grim for both bank and they should be prepared for some major changes in the near future. These kind of dealings are not tolerable and it looks as if prosecutors are finally taking real action.

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